


saltwater girls: a collection

by mingbee



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/F, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-14
Updated: 2017-01-14
Packaged: 2018-09-17 08:26:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9313442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mingbee/pseuds/mingbee
Summary: stories of varying genres about queer diasporic women in taiwan and elsewhere





	

**savi & the wild horse**

It was my grandfather who taught me you must destroy something to build it back stronger. He did this by showing me his teeth, minted in a gold that seemed soft to the touch - but he always slapped away my hand whenever I tried to touch their peaks. The story is: he broke all his teeth by eating handfuls of Yilan seastones, the ones that glowed like hearts. The molars were the toughest to wreck. Some wrenched out of their roots, even, and no one could replace those. In their place, a kind of violence grew into grandpa’s mouth like a sweet tooth. And when all the breaking was done, there was no choice left but to plug every canyon with gold-dyed steel. Mother said it was a disease of grandfather’s, eating all those things: enamel chopsticks, tatami mats, seastones.

But I know the truth. He did it on purpose. I know because he was proud of those teeth. He was the only one to smile in all our family portraits, the glare from his teeth always furring his image around the mouth. I know because he told me one day he’d done it on purpose. He’d seen some triads at the ports with metal teeth and heard that when one of their gang members betrayed a brother, they’d bite off both his ears with their steel teeth, then burn him alive. He imagined it was a beautiful sight, fire archiving the body into smoke. Ash in the river, sweeter than silt.

Ears pop off easily, grandfather said. He held my forefinger to the ridged space behind his ear, where his hair might’ve been tucked when it used to be long, samurai-style. Do you feel how thin the skin is? How springy the cartilage? With ordinary teeth, it’d take chewing. Your jaw would ache just trying to loosen it. But imagine. Bladed teeth, one bite, one ear. And without the ear, grandfather said, the body cannot record. Out of the earholes come slugs of blood, emptying the mind. And then? I loved this part. The body is burnt but the ears are tucked into a silk pouch with drawstrings. They are kept. Ears keep well, my grandfather said. My finger on his ear, trapping his pulse beneath my finger, anchoring it. It slowed. My grandfather tapped his teeth, a hollowed sound. One day, the Japanese will come back, he said, and they better watch their ears. He laughed when he said that. Haha. Watch their ears. Funny.

I wanted to tell him the Japanese were back, actually. 5 businessmen hosted at the local inn. Father had to host them because he was the only one fluent in Japanese - grandpa taught him, in case - and all 5 came back sleeved with girls whose names are said only in the dark. The businessmen were thrilled. Real aboriginal girls, they said, just as they dreamed. One girl was dark as me, as a mare I once saw collapsed by the side of the road, wet with blood. It gave birth right there, in the brief space between motorbikes speeding by. The foal was dead. Who says birth is blood without injury. It was the first dead thing I’d ever seen, but I wasn’t sad. After all, with horses, it’s either bridle or bury.

No one seemed to own the mare, but eventually it stood up, trembled once, walked away. Didn’t even look at its dead. Actually, I recognized one of the girls, a schoolteacher from a neighboring township who’d come to give us a guest lecture on what it meant to be indigenous: we’re an oral culture, she said. I wrote that down in my notebook, underlined it twice. They say that means we have no history, no consciousness, the teacher said. But no. Before she could continue, a boy in the first row interrupted. His name was Savi and he wanted to know: was it history that came first, then consciousness? Or consciousness first, then history? The teacher, I could tell, was angry. That’s not the point, she said, and ignored him. My head bowed over the notebook, I wrote the two words: history, consciousness. Later, when she began to talk about textiles, I got bored and doodled in the notebook, my lead pencil softing with sweat, chinks of light through the ceiling cutting us all down. I began to doodle a horse between the two words I’d written, a pretty horse with a flowing mane, slim neck, glossy pelt.

It was only after I’d finished drawing that I lifted away my hand, now sticky with blood, and saw that it was dead.


End file.
